Paul Theroux - The Elephanta Suite - Three Novellas

Her tone annoyed him, but he was still so dazzled by her glamour, he tried to change the subject. “What kind of wine are you drinking?”

“Indian made. A vineyard in Karnataka. Quite drinkable, actually,” she said. “Do you have them with you?”

“The earrings? I think so.” He took the silk pouch out of his pocket. It reminded him of the pouch in which he’d carried his rejected wedding ring. That thought created an afterimage of Indru, who now possessed the diamond ring.

As he handled the silk pouch, Winky extended her arm, dark and slender and articulated—delicately jointed like the limb of a spider—and Dwight shook the earrings into the palm of her hand.

Deftly, she slipped off the earrings she was wearing, and in a set of movements like a dancer’s gestures, more like touching her ears than attaching earrings, she hooked them, one and then the other, and turning to face him made them swing and glitter.

“They suit me, don’t you think?”

Dwight said yes, realizing what was happening, but could not say any more.

“They catch the highlights of my sari,” she said, and twitched her sash where it was trimmed with gold piping.

“Let me see,” Dwight said. He placed his glass of water onto the marble-topped table and went over to the sofa and sat heavily next to her. He lifted her hair and smoothed it, then touched the earrings, poked one with his finger, and peered closely. “I guess they’re a good fit.”

“I’m delighted you approve.”

He saw that this, like her rambling talk, was another test. He did not like her, but he was fascinated by how obvious she was, and he longed to weigh her breasts in his hands.

“Look at me,” he said—because she was looking away, at a cabinet where there was a mirror.

She turned her head and lifted it slightly with a kind of hauteur that the earrings framed and accentuated.

He kissed her then, just leaned over and put his mouth on hers as though lapping an ice cream. She did not part her lips. She remained as she was, like a big doll, and as she did not even purse her lips to receive his kiss, they seemed to bump his, almost to resist. The first awkward kiss he had ever bestowed on a girl—at the age of twelve: Linda Keith, behind the First Baptist Church-had been something like this.

“What’s wrong?”

“Isn’t that a little sudden? A little previous?” She turned back to look at the mirror, as if to assess whether she had been injured by the kiss, and her earrings danced.

“I guess I had the wrong idea.”

“You’re a very nice man. A generous man”—still she was looking at her reflection, the earrings trembling on her ears.

“What’s the plan, then?”

“The plan,” she said, repeating it his way as though to mock him. “Perhaps we can meet for lunch sometime. Perhaps you can take me shopping.”

Another test, another hoop.

“Perhaps,” he said, using her tone as she had used his. She did not know that when Dwight said “perhaps,” it meant never. At this moment he had finally concluded that he disliked her and almost said: I hope I never see you again. He got up and looked at his watch and put on an expression of surprise and said again, with finality. “Perhaps.”

She seemed startled that he was leaving. She touched the earrings with her beautiful fingers. She said, “Well, then, cheerio.”

“By the way, my name is Dwight Huntsinger.”

“I’m terrible at names. Will you e-mail me? My address is on that card.”

“Perhaps,” he said.

In the street, he was rueful but not unhappy. He mocked himself, replaying some of what she had said. Tingling, yawning with exhaustion, he felt giddy as he walked down the hill to the main road to hail a taxi. And in the taxi he reflected on how, for the hour or more he’d been in Winky Vellore’s apartment, he had not once objected to India. He had forgotten the stink, the noise, the crowds. Now on the main road he was back in India, and he was surprised by his reaction: he was glad.

He was forty-three, and he believed he had made many mistakes in his life, but his pride had saved him from more. He’d married late, the marriage had lasted less than a year, an expensive mistake, but necessary. He knew men who, rebuffed by a woman, pursued her until she submitted; men who were energized by Isn’t that a little sudden? and Perhaps we can meet for lunch sometime. By You can take me shopping when they had asked for a simple yes or no to sex. He was not one of them. Meeting resistance, Dwight shrugged and accepted it as final, was in fact slightly ashamed at having met resistance—ashamed of having requested a favor to which the answer was no. The word “no” did not rouse him. He did not pursue the woman, he had never pursued a woman, never tried to woo one without at least a smile of encouragement. He was literal-minded in sexual matters, and so Perhaps we can meet for lunch sometime he translated as No dice. The process of wooing he found discouraging and at times humiliating.

Because of this, his experiences of women were few, and since his divorce the only women he’d had were Sumitra and Indru—essentially streetwalkers who had pursued him, offered themselves to him in the dark.

Now he thought only of Indru, and after the evening with Winky Vellore—those shattering hours, like a whole relationship, beginning, middle, and end—he had never felt more tender toward Indru. That evening with Winky helped him understand Indru. He knew that Winky would have despised her, but that was a measure of Indru’s worth.

At the Taj, he paid the taxi and was saluted by the doorman as he stood in the stew of odors, strong even here on the marble stairs of the expensive hotel. He remembered his first trip, his solemnly worded thought “the smell of failure.” But there was vitality in it, not only death but life, too.

Meetings the next day kept him in the boardroom late, Shah doing most of the negotiating, yet he needed to observe the process and approve the wording of the contracts. Indian lawyers, their passion for redrafting, their love of arcane phraseology: they could sound in the middle of it all like astrologers. Manoj Verma had not married (and this was just idle water-cooler chat at the top of Jeejeebhoy Towers) until his family astrologer had drawn a chart of his prospective bride’s planets and found them auspicious. Dwight went back to his hotel, his head spinning.

The following day he walked across the road to the Gateway of India at exactly the same time—in the fading glow of early evening—he had met Indru months before. He retraced his steps and passed the ice cream seller; he bought a Thums Up and lingered at the rail of the harbor, then took a seat, hoping that the ritual of these precise repetitions might conjure her up.

Without a word, she appeared and approached and sat beside him on the bench. That was another Indian surprise: Indians might spend hours or days waiting until you showed up—his driver, the courier, even J. J. Shah. When you wanted them, they were there standing at attention, or as in the Indru’s case, uncoiling in the half-dark and smiling.

“I waiting you so long.”

“I want to kiss you.”

She giggled. “Not here. Follow me.”

To anyone who glanced his way, he was a foreigner, a ferringi , perhaps an American—the baseball cap with the suit was a giveaway. He was alone, detached, strolling in the crowd of people on Apollo Bunder, heading north, and now toward Chowpatty Beach. But in fact he was watching a girl in a white dress, and guided by her, he crossed busy streets and negotiated sidewalks that were dense with pedestrians.

At the point in a busy road where in the clouds beyond a gleam of summer lightning broke through, like the shivered splinters of a precious stone smashed by a hammer, the smithereens puddling in a watery afterglow on the slop of the sea at Chowpatty, Indru glanced back at Dwight and her smile touched his soul. Then she walked down a narrow lane and through a gateway, where in the strange light a woman was washing a baby in a tin basin, like a child in a slop of mercury. At a distance the houses were lovely; here at the base of this apartment house the smell of packed-down and heated dirt was so strong it built in his head like a loud noise.